Revision as of 04:01, 6 March 2013

This page describes how you can make the new rt2x00 drivers work. This page does not describe the legacy rt2500, rt2400, rt2570, rt61 and rt73 drivers derived from the original Ralink drivers. The rt2x00 driver has a few advantages over the legacy drivers: It works with all the standard tools, it is in active development as part of the kernel, and it is SMP-safe.

A lot has changed since these drivers were out-of-tree, so it's worth trying the modules (now in the main kernel package) even if the drivers have not worked for you in the past.

Contents

Installing the driver

The rt2x00 drivers are now part of the mainline kernel. One need only load the relevant module:

# modprobe rt2400pci

# modprobe rt2500pci

# modprobe rt2500usb

# modprobe rt61pci

# modprobe rt73usb

The last two require a firmware file, provided by the Linux firmwares package:

pacman -S linux-firmware

Setting the interface up

If you have module autoloading enabled, the drivers should be loaded automatically when you boot your machine or insert the device. If this doesn't work or autoloading is disabled, load the modules manually:

modprobe 80211
modprobe rc80211_simple
modprobe $driver

where $driver is one of the following: rt2500pci, rt2400pci, rt2500usb or rt61pci.

When the driver is loaded, you will have two interfaces, wmaster0 and wlan0.